Presently, commercial truck fleet operators frequently overpay road use taxes because there is no viable method of accurately recording the miles traveled by a truck in each state.
In today's trucking industry, trucks traveling in more than one state are required to have their road use tax apportioned among the states in which they travel. Typically, truck drivers maintain log books which show the time and routes they drive. These documents can be altered or falsified by the driver with little chance of detection.
Consequently, the state taxing authorities often refuse to accept the drivers log books as being accurate, and assess a road use tax based upon their inflated estimate of the number of miles driven within their state. This occurs more frequently in states that have a higher road use tax than nearby states.
One method which has been proposed, for enhancing the reliability of information relating to the mileage a truck travels in a particular state, includes transponders at the state boundaries of interstate highways which are used to record entries and exits from states.
While this method might be able to provide some enhanced reliability, it does have several serious drawbacks.
First of all, the use of transponders requires the states to spend funds for permanent infrastructure, and it further requires an agreement and coordination between the states to have compatible transponders. Additionally, the use of transponders restricts the ability of the system to monitor entries and exits on unprotected secondary roads.
Consequently, there exists a need for improving the information that state taxing authorities use to determine road use taxes, which overcome the problems of the log books and overcome the problems of the proposed transponder type system.